One of my favourite spooky stories is The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706) by Daniel Defoe (the Robinson Crusoe man). Really, this is the first modern ghost story in the sense that it happens in a homely domestic setting, and without any supernatural build-up.

When I was thinking about my own ghost stories, I knew I wanted to write a few of them where place would be integral to the haunting. But I am also interested in how a person may unleash the unholiness of a place, as Jack Torrance does in The Shining.

People who didn’t live as long as we do – people who were often dead in their fifties – understood both distance and apartness in a way that we don’t. All travel is time travel. So, I try to think of this absence from you as a long separation. I must take care of the house and garden, and I am trying my best. You liked things neat and elegant.

Gala puts on her therapy-voice; low, slow, restrained. ‘I am sorry you felt upset. I should have said something. (Pause.) But there were so many arrangements. I didn’t want to burden you. (You can’t cope.) I thought you would be glad. (Ungrateful.) I purchased the app for you. (Spent money.) It trawls John’s phone and emails, his Facebook, his

As Samuel Johnson put it, back in the eighteenth century: ‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.’

Ghosts prefer the past. That’s when they were alive.

What do I think? What do I believe? I don’t know – and that’s the best answer I can give. I do know that scrubbing away all traces of the supernatural hasn’t worked too well for the human psyche. There is a valve, a pressure release, that comes with being able to say, ‘I can’t explain this.’ It’s not anti-science, it’s not superstitious.

No Ghost Ghost Story What kind of a ghost story has no ghost? Towards the end of your life, you promised me that if it were possible, you would send a sign, a sign to let me know that somewhere out there is the person I love. A person recognisable as you. I am sitting at my garden table watching the night. As I type this, I hope the keyboard starts

(Limbus is Latin for ‘edge’, so Limbo is just outside the boundary of Hell proper,